A Letter Addressed to the Rev.
E. B. Pusey, D.D.
on Occasion of his Eirenicon
§ 1. Introductory Remarks
{1} NO one who desires the union of Christendom after its many and
long-standing divisions, can have any other feeling than joy, my dear
Pusey, at finding from your recent Volume, that you see your way to make
definite proposals to us for effecting that great object, and are able
to lay down the basis and conditions on which you could co-operate in
advancing it. It is not necessary that we should concur in the details
of your scheme, or in the principles which it involves, in order to
welcome the important fact, that, with your personal knowledge of the
Anglican body, and your experience of its composition and tendencies,
you consider the time to be come when you and your friends may, without
imprudence, turn your minds to the contemplation of such an enterprise.
Even were you an individual member of that Church, a watchman upon a
high tower in a metropolis of religious opinion, we should naturally
listen with interest to what you had to report of the state of the sky
and the progress of the {2} night, what stars were mounting up or what
clouds gathering,—what were the prospects of the three great parties
which Anglicanism contains within it, and what was just now the action
upon them respectively of the politics and science of the time. You do
not go into these matters; but the step you have taken is evidently the
measure and the issue of the view which you have formed of them all.
However, you are not a mere individual; from early youth you have
devoted yourself to the Established Church, and, after between forty and
fifty years of unremitting labour in its service, your roots and your
branches stretch out through every portion of its large territory. You,
more than any one else alive, have been the present and untiring agent
by whom a great work has been effected in it; and, far more than is
usual, you have received in your lifetime, as well as merited, the
confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak merely for yourself; your
antecedents, your existing influence, are a pledge to us, that what you
may determine will be the determination of a multitude. Numbers, too,
for whom you cannot properly be said to speak, will be moved by your
authority or your arguments; and, numbers, again, who are of a school
more recent than your own, and who are only not your followers because
they have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts
in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their spokesman.
There is no one anywhere,—among ourselves, in your own body, or, I
suppose, in the Greek Church,—who can affect so large a circle of men,
so virtuous, so able, {3} so learned, so zealous, as come, more or less,
under your influence; and I cannot pay them a greater compliment than to
tell them they ought all to be Catholics, nor do them a more
affectionate service than to pray that they may one day become such. Nor
can I address myself to an act more pleasing, as I trust, to the Divine
Lord of the Church, or more loyal and dutiful to His Vicar on earth,
than to attempt, however feebly, to promote so great a consummation.
I know the joy it would give those conscientious men, of whom I am
speaking, to be one with ourselves. I know how their hearts spring up
with a spontaneous transport at the very thought of union; and what
yearning is theirs after that great privilege, which they have not,
communion with the see of Peter, and its present, past, and future. I
conjecture it by what I used to feel myself, while yet in the Anglican
Church. I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself, when I took
down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St.
Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at
length I was brought into Catholic communion, I kissed them with
delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had
lost; and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints, who
bequeathed them to the Church, how I said to the inanimate pages,
"You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any mistake."
Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I speak of, if they
could wake up one morning, and find themselves rightfully possessed of
Catholic traditions and hopes, without violence to their own {4} sense
of duty; and, certainly, I am the last man to say that such violence is
in any case lawful, that the claims of conscience are not paramount, or
that any one may overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's
command, in order to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.
I am the last man to quarrel with them for this jealous deference to
the voice of their conscience, whatever be the judgment that others may
form of them in consequence, for this reason, because their present
circumstances have once, as you know, been my own. You recollect well
what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago, which we
knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Accordingly, I am now in the
position of the fugitive Queen in the well-known passage; who, "non
ignara mali" herself, had learned to sympathize with those who were
the inheritors of her past wanderings. There were Priests, good men,
whose zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke
confidently, when it would have been wiser in them to have suspended
their adverse judgment of those whom, in no long time, they had to
welcome as brethren in communion. We at that time were in worse plight
than your friends are now, for our opponents put their very hardest
thoughts of us into print. One of them wrote thus in a Letter addressed
to one of the Catholic Bishops:—
"That this Oxford crisis is a real progress to Catholicism, I
have all along considered a perfect delusion ... I look upon Mr. Newman,
Dr. Pusey, and their associates, as wily and crafty, though unskilful
guides ... The embrace of Mr. Newman is the kiss {5} that would betray
us ... But,—what is the most striking feature in the rancorous
malignity of these men,—their calumnies are often lavished upon us,
when we should be led to think that the subject-matter of their
treatises closed every avenue against their vituperation. The three last
volumes [of the Tracts] have opened my eyes to the craftiness and the
cunning, as well as the malice, of the members of the Oxford Convention
... If the Puseyites are to be the new Apostles of Great Britain, my
hopes for my country are lowering and gloomy ... I would never have
consented to enter the lists against this strange confraternity ... if I
did not feel that my own Prelate was opposed to the guile and treachery
of these men ... I impeach Dr. Pusey and his friends of a deadly hatred
of our religion ... What, my lord, would the Holy See think of the works
of these Puseyites? …"
Another priest, himself a convert, wrote:—
"As we approach towards Catholicity, our love and respect
increases, and our violence dies away; but the bulk of these men become
more rabid as they become like Rome,—a plain proof of their designs
... I do not believe that they are any nearer the portals of the
Catholic Church than the most prejudiced Methodist and Evangelical
preacher ... Such, Rev. Sir, is an outline of my views on the Oxford
movement."
I do not say that such a view of us was unnatural; and, for myself, I
readily confess, that I had at one time used about the Church such
language, that I had no claim on Catholics for any mercy. But, after
all, and in fact, they were wrong in their anticipations,—nor did
their {6} brother Catholics agree with them at the time. Especially Dr.
Wiseman (Co-adjutor Bishop as he was then) took a larger and more
generous view of us, nor did the Holy See interfere against us, though
the writer of one of these passages invoked its judgment. The event
showed that the more cautious line of conduct was the more prudent; and
one of the Bishops, who had taken part against us, with a supererogation
of charity, sent me on his deathbed an expression of his sorrow for
having in past years mistrusted me. A faulty conscience, faithfully
obeyed, through God's mercy, had in the long-run brought me right.
Fully, then, do I recognize the rights of conscience in this matter.
I find no fault with your stating, as clearly and completely as you can,
the difficulties which stand in the way of your joining us. I cannot
wonder that you begin with stipulating conditions of union, though I do
not concur in them myself, and think that in the event you yourself
would be content to let them drop. Such representations as yours are
necessary to open the subject in debate; they ascertain how the land
lies, and serve to clear the ground. Thus I begin:—but after allowing
as much as this, I am obliged in honesty to add what I fear, my dear
Pusey, will pain you. Yet I am confident, my very dear friend, that at
least you will not be angry with me if I say, what I must say if I say
anything at all, viz., that there is much, both in the matter and in the
manner of your Volume, calculated to wound those who love you well, but
love truth more. So it is; with the best motives and kindest intentions,—"Cędimur,
et totidem plagis consumimus {7} hostem." We give you a sharp cut,
and you return it. You complain of our being "dry, hard and
unsympathizing;" and we answer that you are unfair and irritating.
But we at least have not professed to be composing an Irenicon, when we
were treating you as foes. There was one of old time who wreathed his
sword in myrtle; excuse me—you discharge your olive-branch as if from
a catapult.
Do not think I am not serious; if I spoke as seriously as I feel, I
should seem to speak harshly. Who will venture to assert, that the
hundred pages which you have devoted to the subject of the Blessed
Virgin give other than a one-sided view of our teaching about her,
little suited to win us? This may be a salutary castigation of us, if
any of us have fairly provoked it; but it is not making the best of
matters; it is not smoothing the way for an understanding or a
compromise. Your representation of what we hold, leads a writer in the
most moderate and liberal Anglican newspaper of the day, the Guardian,
to turn away from us, shocked and dismayed. "It is language,"
says your reviewer, "which, after having often heard it, we still
can only hear with horror. We had rather not quote any of it, or of the
comments upon it." What could an Exeter Hall orator, what could a
Scotch commentator on the Apocalypse, do more for his own side of the
controversy in the picture he drew of us? You may be sure that charges
which create horror on one side, will be repelled by indignation on the
other; and these are not the most favourable dispositions of mind for a
peace conference. I had been accustomed to suppose, that you, who in
{8} times past were ever less declamatory in controversy than myself,
now that years had gone on, and circumstances changed, had come to look
on our old warfare against Rome as cruel and inexpedient. Indeed, I know
that it was a chief objection urged only last year against the scheme
then in agitation of introducing the Oratory into Oxford, that such an
undertaking on my part would be a signal for the rekindling of that
fierce style of polemics which is now long out of date. I had fancied
you shared in that opinion; but now, as if to show how imperative you
deem the renewal of that old violence, you actually bring to life one of
my own strong sayings in 1841, which had long been in the grave, that
"the Roman Church comes as near to idolatry as can be supposed in a
Church, of which it is said, 'The idols He shall utterly abolish.'"—P.
111.
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